In the midst of the Camino this spring, I saw something I had not noticed before: a peregrinolooking at his phone. It was a shock of sorts, though I suppose it was inevitable and perhaps surprising that it hadn’t been more common. The practical side of my mind said, I could do that in Dallas; I don’t have to travel to the Camino if I want to walk while scrolling.

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    Back in Dallas, a recent sermon I heard talked about unhappiness. She was giving a not-uncommon snapshot of life today: Alarm goes off. Pick up phone and scroll social media. Eat breakfast while scrolling some more. Go to office and sit in front of a computer and answer a lot of emails. Go home and scroll social media. Walk dog. Eat supper and scroll some more. Watch Netflix. (Etc.)

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    This picture is exaggerated, of course, but most of us will have a slightly guilty sense of recognition even if only for part of it. We know that more fulfilling lives are had when our eyes go a lot of places besides screens. More screen time correlates with more unhappiness, and vice versa. Why? One big reason is our need to look at other people and talk with them. Which brings me to dogs.

    I see a lot of people on the Katy Trail with their dogs—and a lot of them have the leash in one hand while the other holds their smartphone. They’re out with their dog but in some real sense they aren’t with their dog. I don’t know how a dog thinks, but if it were I, I’d be unhappy. “Buster, you were gone all day and now you’re home and you aren’t paying attention to me.”

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    These thoughts of mine—doubtless too judgmental but, dear reader, I’m just being open with you, they have been my thoughts—have received, to my surprise, poetic confirmation. Last week I was reading the May issue of The New Criterion where I found a short poem that began: “My owner stops to watch me, then continues, / as earnest with his toy as I with mine.” I thought: can it really be that a poet is writing about this?

    It goes on: “He doesn’t chew it, though, or lap its edges. / Instead his thumbs, conferring him / divine status, go click-click-click.” 

    It comes to an arresting, slightly embarrassing parallel: “What agitates him so? It’s much the same / as scratching-fits that occupy my ears.” The dog compares it also to moments when he, the dog, sometimes will sit, “nose to the glass,” but won’t respond to his name being called.

    He wishes it were different, wishes his owner’s toy would “go back and leave us alone, two together / so that he can smile on me as he once would.” The poem is called “Pre-social”; the poet is Sunil Iyengar; and you can find it here:https://newcriterion.com/article/pre-social/

    And you might find yourself looking at your toy a little differently. 

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    Fall Dates for Brothers Karamazov seminars (Good Books & Good Talk). The dates have been set for a four-session series on Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. In Dallas, at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Sundays from 5 to 6:30 p.m.:

August 30, Part One

October 11, Part Two

November 1, Part Three

November 29, Part Four

This is how I read a Russian novel, especially for the first time. I keep a list as I read it, putting down every name as it appears, along with a very brief identification, maybe the page number. This is because I have often found myself confused at first, not knowing who was who. But be of good courage! Once you get to about page 50 the genius of the story-teller will catch you up.

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    Out & About. Sunday, July 26, I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas (9 and 11:15).

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    That story about the beaver and the Hoover Dam: A friend in New York traced it down. T. R. Reid, in The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution, related the high praise given which was given to Jack Kilby when he received the Nobel prize: that Kilby “had launched the global digital revolution, making possible calculators,computers, digital cameras, pacemakers, the Internet” and so on. Kilby began his lecture with this response: “When I hear that kind of thing,” he said, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.’” Kilby then added that he had heard the beaver story “from Charles H. Townes, an American who won the physics prize in 1964.”

They shall perish, but you will endure; they all shall wear out like a garment; * as clothing you will change them, and they shall be changed.

These verses are from Psalm 102. Praising God for his work “in the beginning,” the psalm invokes the first verse of the Bible: “In the beginning God created.” Here the Psalmist describes God’s beginning work as laying “the foundation of the earth.” We think of foundation, first, as something that’s underneath a structure—the foundation of a house, for instance. If the foundation is well-laid, the house may well stand. With regard to the earth, of course, there is nothing “under” it—we know that it is round (and many ancients did too), not a flat thing that we could picture standing on something else. 

Perhaps it is better to think of the earth’s “foundation” as natural laws, such as the law of gravity. The late Anglican scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne spoke of the laws that govern matter as being remarkably well-constructed: over billions of years, these laws undergirded an evolving universe that ultimately produced creatures capable of thinking about the universe. Gravity, for instance, is just strong enough to keep things together but not so powerful as to cause things to collapse into each other. 

We can praise God for laying the foundation of the universe in the natural laws that underlie the workings of the cosmos.

God, Psalm 102 says, from the beginning laid these foundations and also fashioned with his (metaphorical) hands the heavens. When we think of “heaven and earth” we are thinking as expansively as it is possible for humans to think about the whole cosmos, extending to the most distant galaxies. Human beings, by contrast, are tiny, vulnerable creatures; we are buffeted about and ultimately die; the universe, “heaven and earth” as a whole, seems by comparison the very picture of permanence.

But the psalmist says, as science also knows, it ain’t so. The earth and the heavens “shall perish.” In the poetry of Psalm 102, they shall “wear out like a garment.” The earth, our familiar zillion-pound complex sphere with a lava core and a 25,000-mile circumference, is going to wear out. It is going to be no better than that threadbare coat in your closet that does no good. What a powerful put-down: the universe itself will be nothing more than a worn-out garment!

And God will take care of it. As if earth and heavens were mere clothing, God “will change them.” This doesn’t mean that the physical universe is connected to God like clothing is connected to the person who wears it; it doesn’t mean that when this created world wears out God will replace it with new clothes. It means something rather surprising. God will “change” the worn-out heaven and earth “and they shall be changed.” God is not, as it were, changing out the contents of his closet, tossing the old clothes and buying new ones. No, at the end, God will transform (and not replace!) the old heavens and earth. They won’t be thrown away. He “will change them, and they shall be changed.”

There are Latin prepositional phrases to mark this distinction. The first creation was ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” God creates everything without tools and without raw material. But the new heavens and new earth, which are to come at the end and are seen by St. John the Divine at the end of Revelation: they are created ex vetere, “out of the old.” 

Which means, I think we can say, that at the end of all things God will do his laundry. The worn-out creation will be, who knows? Washed? Mended? Resurrected? Transformed? We can’t know, we can’t even picture this, but we can wait for it with grateful anticipation.

For God’s character is not to lose anything that can be saved. He will not break even a bruised reed, as Jesus says. He watches over our world with a tender care that nothing be lost.

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A Note on Good Books & Good Talk. This fall we will have a series of four seminars on Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. This is perhaps the greatest novel to have arisen from a Christian heart and mind—some say the greatest novel ever, period. Yet, in part because of its length, many people have never read it. This is your chance to do so, and to enjoy doing so with other Christians. Any translation will do, but I recommend a reputable publisher (Penguin, FSG, Modern Library, etc.) rather than a cheap word-dump printing. For the first session read Part One, which includes three “books” (each book is further divided into chapters). This is about 150 or 200 pages in most printings. 

I’ll be writing more about this through the summer, including hints for people reading a Russian novel for the first time.

In the mihttp://www.thefieldschurch.org/mediafiles/uploaded/0/0e1840389_050904.mp3th century many churches went through a theological renewal. The biggest of these was the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, 1962–65, but on proportionately smaller scale similar changes happened in most churches. The renewal grew out of a sense that received church theology conveyed a view of the human being that was too negative, or that it focused too much on sins that we fall into. Renewal wanted to reclaim a vision of the human that highlighted our destiny to be glorious. This very positive view of the human was seen as emerging already in many cultural and political achievements. The world seemed poised to make great strides against disease and ignorance, thanks to scientific advance. The United Nations’ declaration on human rights was itself an international advance, as were the protocols concerning the treatment of prisoners and the conduct of war.

The movement in the Catholic Church was described as opening their church windows to the world. Some young catholic theologians said to me that, in those heady days following Vatican II, theologians saw the church as the problem and the world as the solution.

Today the situation is quite different. In most circles, optimism about human progress has waned and is almost nonexistent. The world seems an increasingly strange and dangerous place. In bioethics, doctor-assisted dying is legal in ever-more places, and choosing embryos for particular characteristics and editing their genes accordingly are practices on the horizon. One feels the need for scare quotes when speaking of scientific “advance.” There is wide acknowledgment of the harms of social media and “devices” in general. AI looms with simultaneous promise and anxiety. Our decade, the 2020s, feels quite distant from the hopeful mihttp://www.thefieldschurch.org/mediafiles/uploaded/0/0e1840389_050904.mp3th century.

Those same young catholic theologians articulated their difference from their elders who lived through Vatican II. For their generation, they said, the world is the problem and the church, for all its faults, is the only institution capable of countering the world.

Church people may differ on what the best public policy should be regarding particular social issues, particular technologies, particular wars, and so forth. But it is clear that, in this second quarter of the 21st century, we in the church carry a human vision that is at odds with much of the world.

We need to get used to being, more and more, an alternative to the world. Old language, such as is found in prayers that speak of the world in negative terms, has new resonance. The language of sin and our need to confess it has increasing importance. When the Episcopal Church produced its 1979 Book of Common Prayer, many penitential aspects were made optional. But they are there in the book, and they are important, and we may want to increase our use of them. Personally, after decades of skipping the prayer of confession at the beginning of Morning and Evening Prayer, I now almost always say it.

Indeed, the mere fact of admitting you are a sinner sets you apart from the world.

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Out & About. Sunday, June 14, I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, at 9 and 11:15. Then at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s, the Good Books & Good Talk seminar will meet to discuss Tolstoy’s great fifty-page story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Everyone is welcome to attend, and if you read the story you are welcome to talk. To find the seminar: Park in the covered apartment parking just south of the cathedral (church parking is clearly marked). When you walk out of the garage, you’ll be facing the cathedral close. The building to the right of the close is Garrett Hall. I’ll be at the door from about 4:45 to let people in.

Sunday, June 21, I am to preach at St. John the Apostle church in Pottsboro, one of our northmost congregations in the diocese of Dallas. The service is at 10 a.m.